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THE SECRET

THE TERRIBLE SECRET of the Miller family comes out in the open: Gail's mother, Hyacinth, is a murderess. She did something terrible years ago to her own father for reasons that will shock and disgust even the most jaded among us. Gail finds herself going down a path similar to her mother's.

GAIL WOKE UP early and tiptoed around the old house that creaked in its deepest joints. Except for its own groans, the house was quiet with the sounds of sleep. Outside, a rooster was crowing his dominance for anyone who would listen.

She had many good memories in this house, of summers past, of delicious meals shared in joy. She could still recall the sound and feel of 6 o' clocks in her grandmother's backyard, and the smell of a kitchen dreaming of potato puddings. She wandered into the dining room that was dedicated to Aunt Josie's love of reggae and rocksteady music, and to her one true vice, romance novels.

The walls were lined with bookshelves stacked with hard covers and paperbacks, and a large hand-drawn sketch of Grandma Bernice in what they called 'the flower of her youth', young and gorgeous, with all the dirty cards life would yet deal her buried well down in the deck. Gail had only known her years later, when her breasts had lost their pertness, reduced to a wasteland of flesh what she liked to call 'arm warmers', and with kind rivers of wrinkles flowing around her eyes.

Grandma Bernice had died of cancer more than five years ago. It had been one of those outrageously large funerals, and it had been Hyacinth's first and last trip to Needle in 20 years. A shuffle of a pair of bedroom slippers conversing with the carpet interrupted her thoughts.

"Gail is that you?" It was her aunt.

"Yes, Aunt Josie."

"What yu doing up so early child?

"Habit, I guess," Gail said, with a polite shrug of the shoulders.

"Want something to eat? I can cook some ackee and saltfish, with bananas and dumplings if you want," she said.

Aunt Josie was one of the best cooks in the parish, and had numerous certificates and trophies she had won in the annual Jamaica Cultural Development Commission culinary contests.

"Thanks, Aunt Josie," she said, feeling suddenly famished. She was, after all, eating for two. It would take some getting used to -­ this pregnancy. Abortion had never been an option for her.

Once, she had done an exposé on botched abortions performed in a clinic in one of Kingston's most depressed communities, and the image of black scandal bags ripe with afterbirth lying in the dead air of a gully had cured her of any notion she may have nurtured regarding abortion.

She sat down at the table, while Aunt Josie put on a kettle with chocolate tea, and heated the griddle on the stove. Gail wondered to herself why her mother had sent her to Needle, but deep down, she already knew, didn't she? Mommy dearest had sent her to Needle, this charming rural backwater, to fix things, to make them right in Mommy Dearest's eyes again.

But why was she here? Gail was captured by the rough hands of gravity and dragged kicking and screaming towards the inescapable truth about herself: for all her journalistic bluster and bite, she was a spineless jellyfish. It was her mother who ruled Gail's life with an iron fist.

She got up and walked to the nearby French windows, and looked through them at an early morning April sky that seemed low under the weight of the world's shoulders. The sound of chirping birds came through the window. The sizzle of hot oil interrupted her reverie of thoughts and brought her back to the present day with a thud.

She smiled at Aunt Josie.

"Why did Mommy kill Grandpa Rupert?" Aunt Josie cleared her throat.

"I-I-I don't know what you're talking about. Why would you even make up something like that Gail," her lips lied. But her eyes said something different, something more emphatic: how did you know?

"Aunt Josie, don't lie, I know, something went on, and I have carried a terrible guilt all these years that it had something to do with me..."

She cleared her throat again. Aunt Josie was obviously one of the world's greatest throat-clearers.

"Dear child, it had something to do and nothing to do with you. It was just some dark business between Hya and Pa."

"Dark business?"

"Yes. The bastard used to touch her, he used to touch me. He had it coming," she said, simply enough but her face was a mask of pain.

"The bastard had it coming."

Coming in EPISODE 10: Aunt Josie speaks about the abuse, and the incident which happened years ago at a family get-together. It is this incident which Gail is too young to remember, but it is the fulcrum on which her mother's life, and her life turns. It is the point at which Hyacinth decides that her father must die.